Another Little Piece of My Heart (5 page)

To say I was a misfit in j-school doesn't do justice to my alienation. I did what was expected of me, but always in my own way. They tried to man me up by sending me to cover the UN, but imagine a long-haired kid in 1965 soliciting diplomats for a quote. I came back without a scoop, and they soon decided to furlough me in the school's simulated newsroom, where I busied myself with the AP wire, a whirligig that spewed stories and rang bells for breaking news. Or I holed up in the library, reading up on tabloids of yore. Their sleazy energy beckoned me. I dug the combination of lurid prose and puritanical morality that made it possible to lavish attention on kinky sex while condemning it. Salvation was shamelessly combined with baseball (
ANGELS IN THE OUTFIELD
). Extreme-weather headlines reveled in the obvious—
WHEW!
and
BRRR!
I can't explain why I fell in love with these rags, but they inspired a new fantasy. I would be a newshound, trolling the city with a police radio in my car. I would wear a press card in my fedora, or pop the flashbulb that unleashed the chained King Kong.

I realize now that this fantasy had everything to do with the pull of the Bronx. Its passionate intensity was still in my blood. I needed to capture that vitality in my writing, to be high-end but low-down. It would happen much sooner than I thought, thanks to a literary uprising called the New Journalism. This was another hybrid of the sixties, when the most vital culture was being made in the spaces between high- and lowbrow forms. There were no rules in the New Journalism beyond the
obligation to be accurate. It was a fusion of reporting and narrative writing, as real as the facts and as rich as fiction. Its appearance in the hipper magazines signaled a new mass audience with a contempt for rigid categories. This was a very sixties attitude, although I didn't understand that at the time. All I knew was that I found it stimulating. Tom Wolfe, the bad boy of New Journalism, now ran a close second to James Joyce for me. I devoured his articles and worked his style into my pieces, violating every convention my professors were trying to instill. “I don't know what this is,” one of them wrote across my copy, “but you owe me a story.”

In the end I learned more about proper journalistic form than I intended to, and it served me well whenever I had to organize a piece quickly. But the most important thing I discovered at Columbia was that I loved reporting. It was the perfect career for an addict of spectacle who was also an introvert. Doors to the hottest places opened; velvet ropes and police lines parted. I could flash my credentials and nearly anyone would talk to me. If I felt self-conscious about my body, I could always work the phone. It was a grand strategy for dealing with the world. When I got into journo mode I would become the man I wanted to be—aggressive, competent, smart-assed. Finally I saw a way to combine tabloid spunk with new literary possibilities. All I needed was a beat, and I sensed what it might be.

In 1965, two major forces were transforming rock 'n' roll into the art it would become. One of them was
Rubber Soul
, the album that marked the Beatles' departure from the basics toward a new, fusive style. There was a sitar on one cut, they sang in French on another, and some of the lyrics verged on ambiguity (“Isn't it good/Norwegian wood”). This album was a major step toward the potential of pop, and the fact that it fell on deaf ears in the media struck me as outrageous. Such coverage of music as there was focused on Bob Dylan, who had bona fides as a protest singer. Then, in 1965, he did something as audacious as the Beatles, though it shouldn't have been. He plugged in.

I was at one of the concerts when Dylan brought out an electric band. Die-hard folkies booed. He'd broken the golden rule of their music—it had to be played on acoustic instruments. Worse still, he'd abandoned protest for a poetic style of his own invention, one that could support songs about spite and betrayal. I identified with his refusal to be contained. I'd landed an internship at
Esquire
, a bastion of New
Journalism. I thought I'd get to write, but instead, I was put in a cubicle and told to read unsolicited manuscripts, what they called “the shit pile.” After two days I stalked out of the office, shrieking the refrain from “Like a Rolling Stone,” Dylan's first number-one hit and an evocation of everything I felt about the future. How did it feel to be on my own, with no direction home? It felt great.

In 1965, the pop milieu was a world in formation. It appeared on the radar of the New Journalism, but it had no real claim to chic. A new kind of nightclub called the discotheque would change that. These rooms were where the solo-dance styles of the sixties incubated—the twist, the frug, the monkey, all variations on the theme of individuality. But the class mixing was what interested me. Heiresses wiggled side-by-side with anorexic models and
machers
from the rag trade. I crashed this party, despite my obscurity, thanks to someone who came into my life because she needed a place to stay while the catheter that some quack had inserted in her womb produced an abortion. It was a common enough experience in those days. But Margaret was not the kind of guest my roommate usually brought home, if only because she was a woman and he was gay.

I'd met John during my jug-band phase in college. He was an aspiring singer and composer of folkish songs in an old-timey vein. I knew from the start that he was gay, and it intrigued me, but I also knew that he needed me to be his straight friend, and it was mostly true in those days. My homo impulses, persistent as they might be, didn't feel fundamental, and I enjoyed sex with women. John, on the other hand, was a total gay slut. We lived next door to a therapist with many unhappy homosexual patients, and John connected with his share of them. He depended on the kindness of strangers to a remarkable degree, so it seemed to me.

John took me to my first gay bar—I was there as a tourist, we agreed. It was a musty place in the Village with a sign that read,
GENTLEMEN MUST FACE THE BAR
. In those days, serving a drink to a homosexual was a crime in New York, and the police were paid off by the mob families that ran gay bars. The owners would be notified when the cops were about to stage a raid, and a red light would go on, signaling men dancing together to separate. I remember thinking, thank God I don't have to live like this. John's libido was certainly robust, but he was also a romantic,
and he had a terrible time finding a lover who lasted. This was four years before the queer patrons of a bar called the Stonewall Inn refused to abide by the rules that made their lives an ordeal, and fought off the police. Neither John nor I was equipped at the time to draw a connection between his personal problems and the reality of oppression. It merely affirmed my belief that, while sex with men was easy to find, only women could give me love. This was precisely the conclusion that the system was intended to produce.

Margaret stayed in our place after the abortion, because she developed a serious infection. (May no woman ever have to go through this.) It was a bonding experience, and slowly John and she came to love each other. That was unexpected, given his identity, but it was no weirder than my presumptive straightness. To be a heterosexual with queer tendencies or a homo with a girlfriend wasn't so unusual in the underground culture of 1965. In that restive region, the map of sexual identities had not yet been firmly drawn. But John's sexuality, which he made no attempt to hide, wasn't exactly a professional asset. Despite my efforts to tout his music in my column, it never took off. Under the name Jonathan Kramer, he had a small role in
Midnight Cowboy
, a part in the Broadway production of
Hair
(he played Margaret Mead in a mink coat), and a scene in a Warhol extravaganza (“You're not a blonde on a bum trip,” he tells Candy Darling. “You're a bum on a blonde trip”). But fame is far more fickle than talent, and this was especially true for an openly gay performer in the pre-liberation days.

I didn't go to many concerts in 1965. The songs I liked best never sounded as good live as they did on recordings. I was more drawn to the ragtag scene around underground films, those 8mm spectacles with neither plot nor production values but lots of attitude. I knew about them because, back in college, I'd run the Student Cinema Society and booked movies that could only be screened at educational institutions, which were exempt from state censorship laws. One of them was an Andy Warhol production called
Blow Job
. I didn't know what the distributor meant when he said that I could have the film at any length, but it turned out to be a loop featuring a single waist-up shot of a bare-chested man in a leather jacket, reacting while receiving fellatio. I'd placed small ads in the school paper reading,
THURSDAY, 4PM, BLOW JOB
, so we sold out the house, but after twenty minutes the crowd grew restless. “Where's that fat kid who sold us our tickets?” someone yelled.
(John was actually the ticket taker, but he'd retired to the men's room—for a whole hour.)

I'd come quite a way since my college years, when I ran around writing
YOSSARIAN LIVES
everywhere. (Boomers raised on the novel
Catch-22
will know what I mean.) But downtown was a less permissive place than the Bronx. There were many scenes I couldn't enter without someone to vouch for my hipness, and Margaret was the perfect sponsor—she seemed to know everyone who lived and made art south of 14th Street. She introduced me to a poet turned rocker, one of hundreds who had taken the trail that Dylan blazed. His name was Lou Reed. I could sniff out his pedigree: literary ambition and a grasp of rock 'n' roll, a combo I knew well. Like me, he'd grown up looking at Manhattan from across a river, longing for a way in that wasn't corrupting. He loved pop music, and it showed, giving his poetry a lean grace and his querulous voice a rough edge, much as journalism had streamlined my prose. Lou was easy to talk to, not yet the volcano of 'tude he would become. Soon I met his band, the Primitives. They would become the most important group to emerge from the New York underground, thanks to the great enabler of the vortex that sucked in people like Lou and me. I'm referring here to Andy Warhol.

In 1965, he wasn't yet a certified genius, certainly not to the other luminaries of Pop Art. If you were going to be a serious painter in those days, you had to be either butch or closeted. The art world was a decorous place for sissies, but Warhol was openly fey. Even worse for his manly cred, he was an illustrator—he'd made his mark drawing women's shoes. Yet, like many outsiders of the sixties, he was utterly disrespectful of formal boundaries. In his hands, every medium was an orthodoxy waiting to be messed with. In doing so, he shaped the cultural future. His films starring outrageous people playing themselves were a prototype of reality TV. His infinitely reproducible graphics ushered in the age of logo T-shirts and signature shower curtains. Most auspiciously for me, he invented modern disco. In 1965, these clubs were an elite, uptown sensation, but once Warhol entered the game, they became a democratic enterprise. No one ever got turned away from his events, which had a suitably pop name: the Exploding Plastic Inevitable. Giant balloons bounced around the floor, strobes pulsed, and ear-shattering music zoned you out. The latter was provided by the house band, which sounded like a cross between a dental drill and a construction site. These
were my pals the Primitives. Warhol had rechristened them the Velvet Underground.

Lou Reed still wrote their songs, and John Cale provided the signature slash-and-burn riffs, but Warhol added a chanteuse who gave the group a decadent aura. She was an icy blonde named Nico. Her claim to fame had been a minor role in Fellini's
La Dolce Vita
. As for her vocal skills … well, I once compared her throaty alto to the sound of a moose in heat. But she radiated streetwise ennui, as did the stud who circled around the band onstage, cracking a whip. He was Gerard Malanga, God's gift from the Mezzogiorno via the Bronx. I immediately recognized him as the lucky top-man in that blow-job movie I'd shown in college. This was Warhol's greatest talent as an impresario: mixing people of different classes who had a certain self-absorption in common. In his empire of personalities, wealth and beauty didn't matter as much as spectacular narcissism. I was fascinated by this new criterion of flash. Suddenly you were a product of your own creation, a brand you willed yourself to be. And perversion was no longer a vice to be practiced in private, guiltily. It was a mark of individuality, sometimes heroic and sometimes vile, but always interesting.

When I arrived at the Exploding Plastic Inevitable, the first thing I noticed was a thin man peering over the balcony. His hair was silver and his face was pale and round. I knew who he was. Gearing up my journo persona, I sidled up to him and introduced myself, expecting to be ignored. After all, I lacked a byline that could do him any good. But Warhol made an accounting of my background, and I could tell that it passed muster. Not many people were willing to take a student seriously, especially one whose every remark said Bronx. But he was comfortable around bridge-and-tunnel people, and we sat together for quite a while, chatting and watching the set. I think he saw something of himself in my wide-eyed awkwardness.

Within a few years, I would be a regular visitor to Warhol's legendary hive, the Factory. I shied away from its most notorious denizens. Even off amphetamines, they were the nastiest people I had ever met, quite capable of tearing into anyone they deemed unworthy—including one another. Only the drag queens had any warmth. I developed quite a crush on Holly Woodlawn, who radiated the familiar vibe of Latina girls from the Bronx. But my favorite was Candy Darling, a changeling willing to risk everything, which in those days meant unsafe hormone
treatments. (As a likely result, she died young of cancer.) We had several friends in common—including John and Margaret, naturally.